{"pk":28808,"title":"Development of Verb Morphology: From Item-Specificity to Proficient Use","subtitle":null,"abstract":"The initial phase of linguistic production by children is char-acterized by rote-learned, lexically restricted forms and con-structions. Only during later phases of language acquisitiondo they develop flexibility across a paradigm and mix lexicaland grammatical material more freely. In the development ofverb morphology, a correlation between the use of tense andaspect has been observed in many languages. It has been sug-gested that this leads to an intermediary state of paradigm cat-egorization based on temporal categories. So far the flexibilityof individual verbs occurring in different tense-aspect combi-nations has not been examined in detail. Here we evaluate theflexibility of verb use in a large longitudinal corpus of 4 Rus-sian children. We compute the Shannon entropy of verb stemsdistributed over individual grammatical forms. Results showthat children do not pass through a stage of paradigm cate-gorization based on aspecto-temporal categories. After a briefitem-specific phase of rote learned forms, they quickly becomeflexible users of verbs in both aspects.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"language acquisition; corpus study; item-specificity; verb morphology; aspect; Russian"}],"section":"Papers with Poster Presentations","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3kj424db","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Jekaterina","middle_name":"","last_name":"Mažara","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Zurich","department":""},{"first_name":"Sabine","middle_name":"","last_name":"Stoll","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Zurich","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2019-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28808/galley/18679/download/"}]}